Well, thank you very much very, JD Vance. Because of the vice president’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, I found myself looking at photos of Joe Biden licking an ice cream cone to make a judgment call on whether, as Vance claimed, they look “provocative.” I’ll save my final verdict for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.
Watching Vance’s media appearances is painful. She doesn’t have the real charisma of Kash Patel, or the beauty queen of Karoline Leavitt, or the unique approach of her boss in a conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance really wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is not one. And that’s before we get to the trouble of knowing that Vance—a graduate of Yale Law School—is willingly devoted to the pursuit of power and attention. No one has a greater love than this, than him putting down his status as Donald Trump’s millionaire.
Vance was supposed to be on The Joe Rogan Experience develop his second memory, Communionwhich I have not read. (He cheated on me once by submitting Hillbilly Elegy (as a sincere result of a serious writer, and I won’t be fooled again.) Fortunately, that doesn’t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on more serious matters, like alien abductions and foods that risk making you look gay. When Fox’s Jesse Watters did the last bit A few years ago, his recommendations were at least left-wing—soup, as well as anything sipped through a straw—but Vance and Rogan just went with corn dogs and bananas. “Anything that looks like dick,” Rogan explained helpfully.
Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran—which, as you may have noticed, haven’t been particularly successful. People who criticize his efforts, he said, want America to “blow up and bomb. And the honest opinion, Joe, is that they don’t have a solution.” He added: “They’ll say things like, ‘Okay, just ignore them and forget them.'” Crazy! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who started the war with. promise bombing Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Maybe Vance’s amnesia is political genius: He just picks out nine of his most conflicting opinions that Trump has made on any given issue, and agrees with them enthusiastically.
The Iran discussion was one of several places where Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a bar spitter: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I’m going to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused a wake in the profession. True. “He was funding a ton of scientists but when he died it was like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s children weren’t terrifying enough, Vance appeared to hold him accountable for admitting the land.
Other details for this hey-I’m wondering the trick is that Vance deals with the ideological dissonance between his self-image as a smart guy and the constant need to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by pretending that he is not part of this regime, but rather just an interested observer. Vance considers the vice president how Instagram influencers approach vacations in the Maldives: It’s only available when it’s converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said he felt like he was “successful” when he was being accused South Parkinstead of at the time of his inauguration.
Rogan, by his usual college standards, was tough on Vance about US support for Israel, questioning whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence. But then the anchor turned around and suggested Trump had stolen Epstein’s files, a connection that didn’t make sense until he asked if Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the course of the interview, Vance joined Rogan in some kind of dismissive speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier “clearly had ties to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence”. Vance had asked for any relevant documents and found none, he said, “but if the dirt was there, it wouldn’t be there in 2026.”
Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a big alien conspiracy, one of Rogan’s ideas for animation: “I said that I’m going to, like, look into the UFO thing,” the vice president said, “and I’ve been saying it for a year and a half, and I haven’t done it because I haven’t had time.” Sir, you had time to fill in as the host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast after he passed away. Can you take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the following words: Is Roswell a lie Y/N?
Vance many times he is making a fool of himself for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called an “over-reaction” to fighter Josh Hokit taking the microphone at a White House UFC event and shouting that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to point out that it would be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make unsubstantiated remarks about the former first lady for attention. “If she said Michelle Obama is a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it’s like, well, a little story,” Rogan said, adding: “It’s not the best thing to say in the White House.”
Vance took a similar approach with his criticism of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who he dismissed as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now love the term. “There’s a real fandom that I’m a big fan of because I think you have to be sensitive to people,” he said, recovering, “but there’s like a false fandom the way I’m going to appeal to people is to think they’re stupid and act like stupid.” Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying this out loud?
Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began talking about whether there is “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and an alien with high technology.” Rogan suggested that his guest speed up the Iran war talks and get on with real government business, such as finding out whether the government is secretly storing foreign bodies. “I doubt it’s true that we have the remains,” Vance said, before promising to photograph them if he found them. Show to “the women of Attitude,” pointed out Rogan, “the elite leaders of our world.” The ABC show’s hosts may seem philistine to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE detentionnot Area 51.
The last half hour of Rogan’s interview covered Vance’s book, his surprising support for labor unions, and the impact of immigration on wages. But I know what you’re thinking—Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that be as disgusting as JD Vance said? The answer is no. As an answer to the question, “Does JD Vance have the ability to feel shame?”
